In recent years, mobile communication services have expanded and increased in popularity, around the world. Many advanced networks offer wireless mobile communication service for voice calls, mobile messaging services (e.g. text and/or multimedia) and data communications. The data services, for example, enable surfing the world wide web, e.g. via a browser. For example, a tablet computer or a laptop or handheld personal computer (PC) with mobile broadband connectivity enables a user to conduct a wide range of data communications from anywhere that a carrier's network provide wireless data service.
A variety of different types of mobile devices support data communications through a public mobile wireless communications network. Some mobile phone stations that have data communication capabilities can be connected to another terminal device such as a PC, so that the station can act like a modem for data communications to and from the terminal device. Alternatively, a user may have an ‘air card’ for insertion in or connection to the data terminal device. Some terminal devices may be sold which include integral air cards. If a mobile customer subscribes to Verizon Wireless' Mobile Broadband Connect (MBC) service or a similar broadband connectivity feature for his/her mobile device, then the customer can use the device as modem and connect it to PC or the like to browse the Internet. The user can access the Internet via the mobile device and the public mobile network once the subscription is set-up with the carrier.
The first time a user tethers a computer to his/her mobile device, as a modem for the broadband connectivity service (e.g. MBC), and launches a web browser, the device's home agent in the network communicates with the AAA (authentication, authorization, and accounting) system to determine if the user has the broadband DUN (Dial-Up Networking) feature on his/her account for the particular device. If not, the home agent directs the browser client communication to a Self-Provisioning Gateway (SPG). The SPG provides one or more web pages and obtains user information. The SPG communicates with several network support systems on the ‘backend’ to authenticate the user, add the DUN feature to the user's account for the particular mobile device, and obtain an IP address for the mobile device.
However, before provisioning can be completed, an add-on running in the user's PC or the like may attempt to connect to a web server for one or more tasks, such as checking for updates or adding new toolbar buttons, when the add-on is automatically launched along with the browser. Many PCs have a number of such add-ons that launch with the web browser program, each of which will attempt an Internet communication to a server when the browser is launched. Hence, several add-ons acting through the browser in the PC keep making data calls while the mobile device is connected to the PC. For every such data call that occurs during the connectivity provisioning, a new session is created, and an http request is sent. As a result, the home agent in the network will repeatedly redirect those data call requests to the SPG. Hence, such add-ons cause the user's mobile device (handset or air card) to send multiple requests (one for each attempted web access by the browser and through it by each active add-on) to the SPG before the first request is fully processed. In such a case, the SPG would forward all of the requests to the AAA system to validate the device's IP address, and the AAA system may become overloaded in times of peak usage with multiple redundant requests for many MBC data users.
Hence a need exists for an improved way to handle multiple requests caused by add-ons during the initial provisioning for the broadband connectivity service for a mobile device.